Russia had a good thing going exporting natural gas to Europe. Gas is very useful. If you have some, people will pay you good money for it. But transporting natural gas is kind of difficult and requires pipelines whose construction inevitably poses logistical and regulatory difficulties. That’s why Joe Manchin is so fired up about getting West Virginia’s gas reserves hooked up to the main distribution network for the southeastern United States. Russia already had some good pipelines going and another one near completion. The shutdown is going to temporarily cost them some money, but Putin has reason to believe that loss is not such a big deal.

The problem is that he is permanently squandering Russia’s opportunity to be a major natural gas supplier to Europe. For this to work out for Putin, Western European politics would need to spin in a pro-Russian direction with dizzying speed. And the current trends in Sweden and Italy show things pivoting in the opposite direction, with even opposition blocs committing to the western alliance and making it clear there is no exit for Putin. …

From Putin’s perspective, the gambit of backing right-populist anti-system parties seemed to be working pretty well. But the war in Ukraine has made him toxic, and while kneecapping the European economy is genuinely helpful to these parties, it is also making him more toxic than ever. He already missed his chance to replace Macron with Marine LePen in France. The U.K. opposition is positioned as clearly pro-Ukrainian, the main German opposition party voted for Olaf Scholz’s rise in defense spending but argued he didn’t go far enough.

This pattern of backfire has characterized the war from the beginning. People will argue until the end of time what role fear of NATO expansion played in Putin’s decision-making, but the result he got was that Sweden and Finland joined NATO. Putin clearly wanted to establish Russian primacy in the “near abroad,” but instead he’s created a situation where he’s unable to bail out his Armenian allies when Azerbaijan attacks them, so Armenia is now left to hope Nancy Pelosi can help them out.

And most of all, the gas weapon is backfiring.